Migrating to FCP X. Maybe. Issues having both installed? XDCAM Issues?

[Richard D. George]

I have found Larry Jordan's training videos to be very helpful, both for FCP-X and for general editing workflow and organization. (I have no financial interest - just a customer).

[Bill Davis]

[QUOTE=Les Wilson;1821346
I'm still looking for best practices for FCP X in terms of organizing media so it can be used in FCP X event tho it was previously imported into FCP 7 and vice versa if I need to use footage imported by FCP X in an older FCP 7 sequence. TIA[/QUOTE]

My recommendation is as follows.

Learn about making digital clones of your cards. You can use Apples free Disk Utility. Or you can Use a cloning utility like SCDI. Or you can do it directly from within FCP-X using it's built-in Make Archive function (which is build directly into the import window.)

Clones preserve ALL the original camera metadata and create single, double clickable files that if double-clicked - re-creates what looks to X exactly like the original card or drive has been re-loaded.

Clones can be copied and archived to multiple backup locations.

Once cloned, you'll always have the raw material necessary to re-create your edit - because everything FCP-X does is just reference those file to create new render copies that represent the status of your edit.

X is always "looking out" for mounted events and projects. (and from what I've been reading, soon, Libraries as well) So mounting a clone will instantly re-populate any projects with off-line clips. This means you don't actually have to store any clips inside the software or on a particular drive unless you're working with formats that need transcoding, And even if you're doing that - you can always just let X re-render them as needed.

X is built to "load" projects automatically whenever it sees drives with the correct structure. It also is built to automatically store it's working assets in the correct place if you simply use the import and creation tools as they're designed. So it's great to figure out a storage system for where you put things *before* you import them into X. But after you do that - it's a bad idea to move them around via the finder.

X likes to know where to find the assets you've imported, so try not to move them around after you import them.

FWIW..

[Charles Newcomb]

I bought the Larry Jordan series and I couldn't get through them. They move too slowly and his monotone voice sprinkled with feigned laughter was like fingernails on a blackboard to me.

The Izzy videos and the Ripple series were much more tolerable, thus helpful to me. It's been several years and I still go back to them from time to time.

[Les Wilson]

@Bill,
Maybe I'm lost in the terminology. XDCAM users have long preserved original camera format. The Sony utilities are fantastic and enable you to combine cards into a single folder for "archiving". Accessing the original only involves having the disk attached to the system. Log and Transfer accesses any folder of material and generates as many "edit" files or sub-clips in .mov format. There can be as many as a dozen or more subclips from a single original. This is very space efficient as I only need to import what I need for the project from the original. After import, the disk can be remove the hard disk for safe keeping.

Best I can tell, FCP X doesn't work this way. I'm not sure but from what I understand so far, it strikes me as having a simplistic model based on having the camera originals on a real or virtual image whenever you edit.

[Bill Davis]

Originally Posted by Les Wilson

@Bill,
Maybe I'm lost in the terminology. XDCAM users have long preserved original camera format. The Sony utilities are fantastic and enable you to combine cards into a single folder for "archiving". Accessing the original only involves having the disk attached to the system. Log and Transfer accesses any folder of material and generates as many "edit" files or sub-clips in .mov format. There can be as many as a dozen or more subclips from a single original. This is very space efficient as I only need to import what I need for the project from the original. After import, the disk can be remove the hard disk for safe keeping.

Best I can tell, FCP X doesn't work this way. I'm not sure but from what I understand so far, it strikes me as having a simplistic model based on having the camera originals on a real or virtual image whenever you edit.

X is a lot of things. Simplistic isn't one of them.

You simply can't understand it accurately if all you have experience with is NLEs that have NOT welded the DAM (digital asset management) system directly to the editing interface.

Where you talk of "sub clips" X takes a huge leap forward and enables true Range selection. The difference is that instead of a sub-cip being a "thing" - In X, it's just one metadata expression of a sequestered range of frames. And as such, the ranges in X are infinitely flexible. You can have a five minute long clip A - and apply either a single, or as many keywords to that entire range as you like. (this is powerful since the clip might be an interview, and the subject might be Kelly, and she might be talking about Sales - so applying each of those as metadata tags lets you call up the entire clip by any of them -

Then lets say that the first 30 seconds of that clip is Kelly taking about YEARLY sales. So you add "yearly" as a secondary keyword to just those first 30 seconds. Then you notice that half way thru that Yearly clip, she mentions yearly OFFSHORE sales. So you tag the second half of the first clip with OFFSHORE. But then you notice that at :30 she segues into talking about Offshore Yearly FOREIGN Sales -so you tag second half of her first clip - with FOREIGN - and let that range go WAY past the end of the original Sales clip.

What you're doing is applying multiple overlapping discrete keyword ranges to the same exact content.

Each range can be tagged in a fashion as precise or as general as you want to make it. Tags apply to any sequence of frames you like. And there NO limitation on the number of "stacked keywords" you can use, nor the overlapping ranges they occupy relative to the whole clip.

And marking ranges in this fashion take up NO HD space, since they're just metadata references.

Then the real magic happens. Because of how X loads it's Event Libraries into memory - the moment you type in a keyword term (in whole or in part) into the Event Browser - or click the term in a keyword collection - X presents ONLY the matching clip range or ranges to you INSTANTLY as a usable clip in the Event Library.

Finding asset ranges AND deploying into projects suddenly becomes so fast that you find you forget about the actual process of looking for things - and just expect to have everything you've marked in any way available essentially instantly.

Understanding this, you start developing multi-layered strategies where you use Reject, Favorite, and custom keyword strings to not only search for footage, but to also nearly instantly sort, group and "bucket" your clips into database driven arrangements that can end up letting you do tasks like string outs and rough cuts WITH A SINGLE KEYSTROKE. (I had 15 takes of scene 104 - but only take 9 was rated A - now give me all my A takes of ALL my 115 scenes - cool only ONE for most of them with maybe a couple with two takes rated A. So in a couple seconds you find by A rated, sort by Scene number. Batch select the resulting group - tap the W key - and BINGO - you have a basic stringout of your entire edit in a single keystroke. you go watch the few scenes where where know you had two options - dump the takes you like least - and you have a rough cut done in maybe 10 minutes. With magnetism and some decent pre-editing when you picked your selects, you're DONE with a rough edit in a few keystrokes.

I've done radio spots putting Audio on the Primary Storyline and using this type of rating system and have actually generated deliverable work in a SINGLE KEYSTROKE using X. It's kind of spooky.

Honestly, it takes some months to "learn" how X operates, but the real secret is that once you start to understand that you can index and sort and sift ALL your digital assets within the Event Browser, it starts changing how you edit.

When I started editing in X, I was at first concerned that since I was spending MORE time in the Event Browser naming and color correcting and trimming stuff - that X was going to be a slower edit system.

Now I LAUGH at myself for that foolishness.

Because here's what ended up happening. On a typical one week edit schedule - would start out presuming that taking the first three days to organize things would mean I'd be pushing my 7 day deadline out - but what actually happened time and time and time again, was that when I finally got to my storyline stage after 3 days of prep - I'd look up in a day - or perhaps a day and a half - and realize that I was finished with the whole show. Instead of adding time to my edit, the prep in X - along with the magnetic timeline and some of the other tools in X made what would normally have been 4 day final edits into 1 or one and a half day final edits. X was supercharging my productivity with it's new tools and concepts.

And it still is.

I'm nearly two years into using it almost every day - and I'm STILL stumbling into things about X that lets me let me cut chunks of time out of my editing work - and I'm getting more precise and better looking results.

The people who struggle with it are largely in two classes. The first is those with extremely specific workflows that require outside, collaborative work in the diminishing number of areas where X still doesn't have all the capabilities of the NLEs that have had a decade or more to develop - or those people who have huge trouble letting go of the way they USED to do things - and insist on coming to X while keeping as much of their "muscle memory" from their prior NLEs as possible.

X means "un-learning" old habits and embracing new ones. Nobody can tell you how you will or will not "take to" X - all I can say is that I'm so much more productive as an editor now that I'll simply never go back.

Mr. Ubillos (He designed much of the original Premier, then Final Cut Pro Legacy, and now FCP-X) has kept looking at how editing has evolving and keeps refining his thinking to meet the new challenges of our changing industry. Today, that means file-based workflows and an industry that regularly deploys more cameras, of more types, generating more footage, in more formats, all of which needs to be stored intelligently - and then recalled instantly - to be arranged rapidly and with great precision. That's the world X was designed for.

I spent more than 10 solid years editing on FCP-1-7 before I switched. And after about 7 months of editing on X - I had to open an old project to do in 7. The frustration made me want to cry.

My 2 cents, anyway.

[Les Wilson]

I fully understand the DAM and keywording. It's not what I was asking about.

[Bill Davis]

Then what WERE you asking about?

Your post: "Maybe I'm lost in the terminology. XDCAM users have long preserved original camera format.

As does X as an option. If you don't enable ProRes or Proxy, X works with native files by default.As well as the computer resources you can throw at them allow.

"The Sony utilities are fantastic and enable you to combine cards into a single folder for "archiving"."

You can certainly do that as well in X. Again, what's the question?

Accessing the original only involves having the disk attached to the system. Log and Transfer accesses any folder of material and generates as many "edit" files or sub-clips in .mov format. There can be as many as a dozen or more subclips from a single original.

I had thought that this was your central contention was that "there can be as many as a dozen sub-clips from a single original" and how Log and Transfer (a copy process compared to the X referential one) was what I was addressing in my post. In X you can range select from your import files and only import the footage you want - so that doesn't seem like a differentiator.

Your next phrase:

"This is very space efficient as I only need to import what I need for the project from the original. After import, the disk can be remove the hard disk for safe keeping."

Again, range import and electing "copy files to the Event" does the same thing - tho in X, few of us recommend that process since you're just doubling original media that is better served from mounted disk image in X, but whatever.

Best I can tell, FCP X doesn't work this way. I'm not sure but from what I understand so far, it strikes me as having a simplistic model based on having the camera originals on a real or virtual image whenever you edit.

Again, what do you see as "simplistic? My admittedly long-winded response was done to indicate that the entire IMPORT system feeds directly into the keyword system that is intrinsic to how X allows editors to access media not just from old-style copied clip pools - but by references to sparse disk bundles that are much safer, clonable for safety - and massively efficient.

X allows agile and flexible import - and on-going work to be accomplished rapidly and flexibly with OR WITHOUT copying any clips into new locations. Just references to footage pool drives that you attach as needed.

Seems to me it's traditional NLE structures that are simplistic by comparison.

But perhaps I'm misunderstanding you.

Perhaps it would help those reading and trying to learn the similarities and differences more if you can outline what you like about the way you do import. Then I can outline my process.

That might help make the similarities and differences more clear.